


i'll take the desert, you take the coast

by searidings



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst with a Happier Ending, F/F, Post-Crisis, lena is a dramatic gay but we already knew that, on GOD our girls are gonna take some time and do some HEALING, one day per year, post-reveal, this is a Totally Proportionate Response to a fall out between two Very Good Friends, took the angst from s5 and went from there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:35:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26631490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/searidings/pseuds/searidings
Summary: it takes ten years and two state lines between them before lena can face kara again.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 50
Kudos: 608





	i'll take the desert, you take the coast

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from 'to each his own' by talos - a vibe in itself and inspiration for this whole thing.

(0)

In all honesty, Lena would have expected the DEO’s prison cells to be soundproofed.

It just seems a little slack for covert government agents to make a habit of having sensitive conversations in hallways where they can be easily overheard by prisoners. Though, Lena supposes, most of the beings held in these cages probably don’t have much hope of ever getting out.

Lena wonders if the same will be true of her.

“Absolutely _not,”_ Alex explodes somewhere down the hall, out of sight but certainly not out of earshot. “Thirteen people are _dead,_ Kara. She is not just going to walk out of here.”

It seems the same might end up being true for her after all.

“She didn’t kill them.” This is the first time Lena has heard Kara’s voice in 364 days.

“She didn’t stop them dying, either.”

Lena presses the back of her head to the cool wall, closes her eyes. Pushes down the nauseating guilt that rises within her. This cell is far too small for her to be able to vomit in any distant corner.

“She ended this! She did what the DEO couldn’t. What _you_ couldn’t. She stopped him.”

How can Kara’s faith in her still shine so brightly after the year of silence and pain between them?

“We don’t know _what_ she did, outside of her unquestionable involvement with the three bombs that went off this morning.” A sharp thud, like a fist on concrete. Must have been Alex’s, or else the whole wall would have collapsed.

“Need I remind you of the multiple occasions you’ve been convinced she’s part of her family’s nefarious plot, only for her to take them down from the inside?” Kara shoots back.

“You think she’s the reason Lex is dead?” Alex’s tone practically drips with incredulity.

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

There’s a very long pause. Lena picks at a loose thread on the cuff of her DEO-issue hoodie and sweats. Tries to ignore the faint smell of burning emanating from her hair.

“Well, whatever you believe—” Alex’s voice is quieter now. Appeasing. “Whatever the truth of her involvement, she can’t stay here. National City is out for Luthor blood, and her name is as implicated in those bombings as her mother’s and brother’s.”

“It’s my fault she went back to her family in the first place. I have to fix this. Let me get her out of here, Alex, _please_.” Kara’s voice is so small Lena barely catches it. Honestly, she wishes she hadn’t.

Alex’s soft tone borders on pity. “Kara, she won’t go anywhere with you. She won’t go _near_ you. You two need, like, a state line between you before the rest of us have any hope of peace.”

She hears Kara sigh and it sounds like the end of the world. “If that’s what it takes to keep her safe,” she says, and the tone is full Supergirl efficiency but it doesn’t manage to fully obscure Kara Zor-El’s pain, “—then that’s what we’ll do.”

(1)

On the first anniversary in her new home, Lena finally perfects powdered synthetic Kryptonite.

She has had a whole year in a desert mansion complete with fully-stocked inventing lab and killer Wi-Fi – not to mention New Mexico’s finest sandstone countertops – so it’s not like it’s been a stretch.

She’s long since mastered the art of the homemade pot sticker so to mark the occasion she cooks up an extra special batch. The pork is free range, the Chinese cabbage organic. The ginger, Lena grew with her own two hands in a plant pot on the deck.

The warm aromas of soy and sesame fill the space as she cooks, humming along to an old rock song on the radio. In go the spring onions, the black pepper and the rice wine. Flour dusts her cheeks as she reaches out for the tiny lead-lined container. Unscrews the lid, tips the light green powder into her mixing bowl. By the time she’s combined the flour and water and is kneading the dough into a flat sheet the greenish tinge is barely noticeable.

The finished product smells divine. Lena’s mouth waters as she plates up the pot stickers, garnishes the dish with chives, sesame seeds, a wedge of lime.

She sets the bowl down on the great reclaimed wood dining table, capable of seating ten yet never seating more than one. Chews on the inside of her cheek as she stares down at her masterpiece.

She actually has to clench her fingers into fists to prevent herself reaching out to taste one. Powder does not reduce potency, and the amount of Kryptonite in each of these golden-brown jewels would knock the socks off even the hardiest non-Kryptonian around.

Lena sits at her huge table for a long time, eyes lost somewhere between the plate and her locked front door. Long enough that day turns to night through the wall of windows to the west, yet the door never opens. Heeled boots never touch down on her porch.

She’d wondered, before today, whether she listened out for her. Whether she kept track, kept tabs, tuned in to what Lena was doing. Whether she’d hear Lena whispering her name.

But the door never opens.

Lena considers, for a brief moment, boxing up her creation. Driving the long lonely dirt track into town and mailing it to the address she’ll probably know by heart until she dies.

But then she wouldn’t get the pleasure of watching her eat them. Watching sickly green thread through her veins, watching blue eyes widen in agony, in understanding. Watching her disintegrate visibly the way Lena had invisibly every second since she’d first put a bullet in her brother’s heart.

She’d like a front row seat to that, she thinks. But she can never set foot in National City again.

Far away over the ridge, a coyote howls at the moon. Lena picks up each pot sticker with delicate fingers, gathers together the chemical components of synthetic Kryptonite. Piles it all in the sand a safe distance from her home, lights a match, and watches it burn.

(2)

The missile soars overhead while Lena is in the garden watering her tomatoes. They’re doing well, even after last year’s aphid infestation. Against the cloudless sky it’s easy to spot the tiny red and blue figure that shoots after the rocket a moment later, heading east.

Lena growls and tosses the hose into the dirt.

The phone isn’t difficult to find despite two years’ worth of crap accumulating in her kitchen drawer. She powers it up and scrolls to the only contact, the only reason she still has the damn thing. Picks impatiently at a hangnail as she waits for the inevitable message tone.

“Don’t think I didn’t see you,” she hisses without preamble. “Because I did. No emergencies, no excuses. We had a deal, and you’re not holding up your side _._ ” The statement is punctuated by the sharp thud of her fist hitting the cool stone countertop.

 _“_ Everything east of the 110th meridian is _mine_. You got what you wanted, you got National City so just— just fucking stay there, okay?” She wills her voice not to shake. “Stay _away.”_

She ends the voicemail and switches the damn thing off, tosses it back into the drawer. Braces her hands on either side of the sink as she stares out the window, breathing hard.

Drops of water glisten on her ripening tomatoes. Their plump shapes are silhouetted against the midday sky, ringed in sunlight. Red and blue and _fucking_ gold.

Lena sucks in a deep, steadying breath. Calmly and deliberately punches one single fist-sized hole through the kitchen drywall.

(3)

This day, this fucking date sticks in Lena’s mind as surely as if it was circled twenty times on her calendar in bright red sharpie. It isn’t, of course. Lena doesn’t even own a calendar.

But the date fixes itself to the back of her eyelids the second her phone’s clock ticks over to midnight. Another year. Another year _here._ The third anniversary of the death of her life as she knew it.

Lena rolls out of bed with a sigh. Leaves the unfamiliar blonde asleep in her sheets as she pulls an oversized flannel around her naked body. Brews herself a chamomile tea and takes it out onto the deck under the light of the full moon.

She breathes deeply against the vast empty silence, the distant ridges of mountain shadow, the cacti silhouetted against the Milky Way. Prays to god that the blonde, whose name escapes her, will sleep till morning. Won’t notice her absence until an hour at which it’s acceptable for Lena to kick her out.

They don’t know each other. She doesn’t know any of the people she brings back here and they don’t know her. Not really. Lena doesn’t think she wants to be known, anymore.

They’re not here for _her,_ she knows. They’re here for her million dollar mountain views and the exclusivity of her king-size mattress. They’re here to put to bed – pun intended – their own curiosity about the mysterious millionaire recluse who now owns half the desert in the state.

They’re here for her, but only insofar as she is fair skin burnished gold, dark hair shot through with amber under the sempiternal desert sun. Insofar as she is a slender, pliable body kept lean through hours of toil in the arid heat. Insofar as she is hooded green eyes and near-silent pink lips, confident and enigmatic and utterly impenetrable.

She stares out at the immensity of the dark. The sheer expanse of it, the simple _nothing_ in every direction as far as the eye can see is the only thing that keeps her breathing, some days.

If she’s quick, she’ll have just enough time to finish her latest prototype for Sam before the stranger in her bed wakes. Sam, steadfast Sam, who patched the hole the Luthor name blasted into the sinking ship of her company. Who steers it sure and resolute now as its captain, its CEO. Who refused to let Lena destroy the only good thing her ruinous hands had ever built, untethered L-Corp from its disaster of a founder and turned it into a beacon of philanthropic innovation.

Sam, who still accepts designs and prototypes whenever Lena wants to contribute, who reproduces them in anonymous perfection. Sam, who’s given Lena a beautiful legacy she doesn’t deserve.

Sam, who Lena has never deserved.

She tries again to remember the blonde’s name but her mind is filled with nothing but the date. This date, this day, this year and every year before it piled higher and higher with pain and regret.

The weight of it feels like it may topple her entirely. Lena goes back inside.

(4)

Lena likes to think that she’s gotten a pretty good grip on desert life by now.

Four years on, the blazing sun no longer bleaches her very life force from her bones the moment she steps outside. She no longer flinches at the song of coyotes at midnight, knows the difference between the rustle of a scorpion in the dust and the warning patter of a rattlesnake. Even knows which varieties of cactus fruit may provide hydration in a pinch without poisoning her.

She misses the ocean, sometimes. The lush of the coast, the smell of rain clouds. The endless abundance of new life, new opportunities. Washed away sins, never-ending fresh starts.

But she’d forfeited that luxury, that home. And the desert isn’t so bad.

There are actually parts of it she’s come to enjoy. To love, even. The uninterrupted sky, clear blue more often than it’s anything else. The majesty of the stars that put every twinkling city light to shame. The heat, the warm embrace of the air, the polar opposite of her frigid Metropolis childhood.

But right here, right now, plummeting down a deep and unforeseen canyon in the rock she was hiking over just moments ago, Lena fucking _hates_ the desert.

A scream rips itself from her throat quite without her consent even as she skids to a halt, wedged a good ten feet into the heart of the stone. One of her hiking boots is jammed immovably into the narrowing crack below her. Tugging at it shoots a sharp bolt of pain through her ankle.

Lena releases a steady stream of curse words in increasingly varied and colourful combinations. Snaps her mouth shut as she registers a sound she’d hoped never to hear again. The whip of wind against a heavy cape reaches her just as a shadow blots out the daylight at the top of her little ravine.

“Don’t you dare come down here,” she hisses out as quickly as her mouth can form the words.

The shadow falling across her body stops moving. Lena will not look up. Focuses instead on her trapped boot. “What the hell are you doing here?” she asks the worn stone inches from her face. Yanks again at her ankle, only to gasp out a sharp breath as the joint cracks and protests.

It must be her imagination, but Lena could swear the breath she sucks in through her teeth is echoed by the figure above her head. “You know what, never mind,” she grits out, fingers working at her stubborn laces. “Don’t speak, I don’t want to know.”

She’s almost got the boot off now. “You’re not supposed to be here. This isn’t our agreement.”

A tiny shower of dust rains down on the top of Lena’s head as though the shape at the top of the canyon is shifting, preparing to descend. Lena slams one clenched fist against the warm red stone.

“Do _not_ come down here,” she repeats emphatically. “I don’t need your help. I’m perfectly fine.”

That should be irrelevant, shouldn’t it? The wellbeing of one of them is none of the other’s business, hasn’t been for years.

The hot sting of tears claws its way up the back of Lena’s throat. It has exactly nothing to do with her throbbing ankle. “Just, please. Go. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear your voice.”

Another long moment in which the sky above her head is obscured by shadow. She wiggles her socked foot free of the offending boot at last, and the shadow is gone.

Lena expends not insignificant effort and energy dragging herself back up to the top of the godforsaken crack. Boot in hand she re-emerges, flopping down on her back on the baked red rock.

The sun is blinding but welcome, warmth seeping into her battered bones. Bright enough that she can pretend the moisture pooling in her eyes is nothing more than a biological defence.

Bright enough that even when her gaze finds the tiny figure hovering high in the sky above her in silent vigil, she can pretend she’s seen nothing at all.

(5)

The email arrives the night of her fifth anniversary in her desert home.

She’s sent hundreds of emails to this address, plans and designs and prototypes for new L-Corp projects. Before today she’d never received one back.

_Alex and I are getting married._

Lena stares at the single line of text until the words blur. She laughs. Then she cries. Then she puts her laptop on the floor and tucks her feet beneath her in the huge leather armchair.

Sam will look beautiful in a wedding dress. Radiant and vital and happy and deserving.

Alex will look beautiful too. Even back then Lena had seen the way she watched Sam. The way she’d sneak glances at her from the corner of her eye just in case the person she coveted were to suddenly disappear. Lena had seen it because she’d done it, too.

Lena wants to be at this wedding like she hasn’t wanted anything in half a decade. To bear witness to possibly the only good thing to come out of the decisions she’d made, the mistakes she’d forced upon the world. To see Sam. To see Ruby.

Ruby who would be – the mental math is harder after a bottle or three of merlot – _fuck_ who would be twenty-one now. Yet another beautiful thing in the list of beautiful things Lena has missed.

She’d wanted it all for herself, once. The flowers and the hors d’oeuvres and the string quartet. White lace and golden hair and bright blue eyes.

But any hope of seeing that wedding, this wedding, died alongside the thirteen people whose deaths she didn’t stop.

Lena deletes the email before she can do anything suicidal like reply.

_( (-1) )_

_(“Lena, I’m— I’m Supergirl.”_

_God, she’d laugh if she thought she could pull it off without crying. “I_ know _.”_

_“You— what? You do?” Kara’s fingers fiddle nervously with the hem of her blue button up._

_“Typical, isn’t it?” Lena asks around the stones lodged in her throat. “Even the collapse of the entire multiverse couldn’t erase the memory of the pain you caused me.”_

_Kara is pacing the length of Lena’s office, refusing to meet her eyes. “No, no, no, no,” she mutters, fingers twisting together so hard her knuckles turn white. “This is wrong. You’re not supposed to remember. I was supposed to have a chance to fix this.”_

_Lena sags against the edge of her desk. “There is no fixing this, Kara.”_

_“No. No, there has to be.” She whirls on Lena, eyes ablaze. “I was going to do it better. I was going to do it right this time.”_

_Lena wishes with all her heart for this to just be over. “There’s nothing you could say—”_

_“I love you.” Fervent and sure. Lena’s heart stops. “I love you and I’m Supergirl and those are two truths about me that you need to know. That you should have known from the beginning. I was going to tell you. I was going to start us off right this time.”_

_Every word that falls from the blonde’s mouth takes another piece of Lena with it. “Kara, please—”_

_“I’m so in love with you, Lena. It makes me crazy. It’s made me more afraid of losing you than anything else I can fathom. So I lied to you to keep you, and then I lost you anyway.”_

_Lena feels like she’s crumbling. “You can’t just—”_

_“But we’re here.” Kara is so close her breath tickles Lena’s cheek. “Everything is gone and Earth Prime is all that’s left but we’re here. We’re here and I_ love _you.”_

_And everything else is lost as Kara lifts her oh so gentle from the edge of her desk and crashes her lips to Lena’s. Kara kisses her like she’s drowning. She cups a warm hand around the hinge of her jaw so she can feel it when Lena opens to her, when she licks into her deep and hot and slow._

_Kara kisses her so thoroughly that Lena’s not sure she’s ever lived before this moment. There’s nothing, not even atoms separating them as Kara’s fingers trace the delicate notches of Lena’s spine, twist into the fine baby curls at the nape of her neck._

_Kara rests their foreheads together as she sucks on Lena’s bottom lip, releases it with a wet pop. “I love you,” she breathes into Lena’s open, panting mouth. “Rao, I love you.”_

_Lena feels,_ hears _the exact moment that the person she thought she was snaps in two._

_“Get out.”_

_Kara’s response is only to hold her tighter, a strong thigh slipping between Lena’s legs. “What?”_

_“You heard me. Get out and don’t come back.” Lena forces herself not to tremble. Not to grind down. “I never want to see you again.”_

_Kara still has not let go of her. “You don’t— you don’t mean that.”_

_“I do.” She shoves Kara away. Kara lets herself be shoved. Lena might slap her if she didn’t think she’d break her hand. “If this is what you do to the people you love, I want no part of it.”_

_Every molecule of Lena’s once vibrant, living body goes cold the second she and Kara disentangle. “I won’t say it again,” she says again anyway. “Don’t ever come back.”_

_And, most beautiful of curses, most painful of gifts, Kara doesn’t.)_

(6)

Maya doesn’t open the letter from MIT when it arrives in the mail.

She gets into her beat up little Chevy instead and drives all the way out to Lena’s secluded desert mansion with the envelope on the front seat so they can open it together. Stomach swooping, Lena watches the girl’s trembling fingers as she carefully pries open the seal.

Of all the STEM kids Lena’s tutored at the local municipal library over the years, Maya was the first. She’s also the toughest, the smartest, the most obstinate. The most like Lena herself.

When Maya had been arrested at fifteen for underage driving, roped into robbing a convenience store with her older cousins, Lena had bailed her out of jail. She’d stared down the set jaw and pouting lip in her passenger seat and she’d told the girl to have a good hard think about what she wanted out of her life. About whether going the same way as her family was really the only option.

 _You are too good and too smart to follow in their path,_ she’d said.

Someone had believed in Lena like that, once upon a time.

Maybe that’s why she’d stayed. Maybe that’s why she’d taken the tantrums and the swearing and the screaming. Weathered all of Maya’s little rebellions, every attempt to shove her away. Maybe she needed to show that there are people waiting to lift you up the second you decide to turn the corner.

Maybe she needed to prove, to this kid and to herself, that there’s nothing you can’t come back from.

Maya is beautiful. Eighteen and headstrong and kind. Working at a florist’s after school, teaching special needs children to swim at the weekends. And now, Lena realises as a pair of slim arms fling themselves around her shoulders, a full scholarship bioengineering student at MIT.

It takes Lena a moment to remember how to hug back.

This teaching, these kids, they have the uncanny ability to make Lena feel genuinely proud of something she’s done for the first time since she’d arrived in this sun-baked state six years ago.

Them and her self-sustaining hydroponic vegetable garden, of course.

(7)

It’s raining the day a Kryptonian shows up at her door.

Lena’s not sure which of the two events is stranger. Watches huge glistening drops roll off a thick red cape and thunk into the sand in a sort of daze. But Clark doesn’t give her much time to muse on it.

“Kara is dying.”

Straight to the point, then. He’s inside before Lena’s convinced she’s invited him. Taps his fingers anxiously against his belt as he drips a quiet puddle onto her concrete floor.

“She’s dying, Lena. She might already be dead.”

He’s looking at her expectantly. Lena cannot fathom how he can think he’s entitled to stop her whole world on its axis and expect her to form a coherent response.

“Alex and J’onn didn’t want me to come,” he’s saying as Lena tugs a hand through her loose hair. “But I knew you would—”

She cuts her eyes to his face, hard. Lena has no interest in hearing whatever Clark Kent thinks he knows about her. The hero looks suitably chastised, dipping his gaze in deference. “Do you have anything here?” he asks, voice pulled taught like overworked metal. “Anything that could save her?”

“I— I gave all my Super tech to the DEO when I left,” Lena manages, throat thick.

“It’s gone, destroyed. We used it all.” Lena gets the distinct impression this conversation isn’t moving fast enough for Superman. That he’d superspeed his words if he could. “Do you have anything else?”

Of course she does. Lena Luthor is first and foremost a scientist. An inventor with a surplus of time, cash, resources. And, in truth, a vested interest in the longevity of Earth’s Kryptonians.

Or one of them, anyway.

She gives Clark everything that might be useful and then some. Watches him shoot away with her heart in her throat. Sits, literally and figuratively twiddling her thumbs as the rain pounds down and the world keeps spinning and everything feels a thousand different shades of wrong.

The next morning her phone buzzes with a personalised news alert she hadn’t disabled in over seven years. A scan of the headline tells her Supergirl has rescued the class pet belonging to the second grade of National City Elementary, a chinchilla named Henri, from a storm drain.

A thousand miles away, Lena Luthor sinks to her knees on her kitchen floor and sobs.

(8)

Prison has not been kind to Lillian Luthor.

Or perhaps her mother’s sunken face and feeble body have more to do with the two heart attacks that have confined her to this bed, trussed up with wires and IVs even as she’s handcuffed to the railing. At least the doctor’s prognosis – the one which granted this ill-advised compassionate visit – finally lays to rest one of the enduring uncertainties of her childhood: her mother must once have had a heart for it to have stopped.

But the frailty of her body does not translate into Lillian’s voice. “Thank God they’re keeping me in Kansas and not Nevada,” she says in lieu of a greeting the moment Lena walks in. “Otherwise your little divorce contract with the Kryptonian might have prevented you from making the trip.”

Lena gapes. “Oh, I know all about that,” Lillian continues, smug. “Very efficient. Split the country in two so you never have to cross paths again. I often wish I could have done the same with your father.”

“Mother.” Lena works to keep her voice even. “I wish I could say you were looking well.”

“Prison tends not to agree with the Luthor constitution.” Lillian wafts her hand in the direction of the drab industrial décor. “Your brother knew that. I thank God his murder at least kept him out of here.”

Lena folds her arms across her chest, grips both elbows tightly. “Lex wasn’t murdered. He was killed by his own faulty bomb.”

Lillian clicks her tongue. “As if my genius son would ever make such a foolish mistake in the wiring. He never would have blown himself up.”

“No,” Lena agrees. “But your genius daughter might.”

“So you admit it?” Lillian’s eyes light up like a lynx scenting prey. “You did kill him?”

Lena did not survive a Luthor childhood by handing her mother the keys to her kingdom that easily. “Lex killed thirteen people and then himself with bombs you helped him design. I’d say you both ended up exactly where you deserve to be.”

“Speaking of getting what’s coming,” her mother continues as smoothly as if they were discussing the weather. “I don’t suppose you could negotiate another of those deals with your pet Kryptonian for me? The one that’s kept you out of this hellhole these past eight years?”

At the incredulous silence between them, Lillian tuts. “Come now. There must be something you can do for your mother. Or can one only secure such an _intimate_ accord during post-coital pillow talk?”

True to form, her mother manages to find the one chink in her armour that shatters Lena’s composure like a mirror. “I— she— we were never—”

“It’s very unladylike to stutter, dear.” Lillian looks utterly unconcerned by Lena’s reddening cheeks, inspecting her fingernails with a critical eye. “I’ve long been aware of the desperation with which you’ve flung your affections at that alien’s feet. I’m sure we’re all fully cognisant of exactly why _I_ am sitting in a prison cell and _you_ are not.”

“It wasn’t like that,” she says even as she curses herself for engaging at all. “Nothing ever happened.” She can’t, she _won’t_ think about the blissful press of Kara’s lips on hers, nine years ago to the day.

“But not for lack of desire.” Her mother’s tone is bored as she reaches for the call button. “On either of your parts. Thankfully her little betrayal put a stop to that before I had to. For a while there I really thought I’d have to endure the indignity of a child of mine shacking up with a Kryptonian.”

She wafts her fingers in Lena’s direction as two guards appear at the door. “Always a pleasure, dear.”

Before Lena has a chance to say another word she’s shepherded out of the cell.

She’s halfway home, stopped at a rundown gas station on the I-40 when she gets the call that Lillian had suffered a final, catastrophic heart attack less than an hour after Lena’s departure.

She stares unseeing at a garish display of individually packaged pickles as she ends the call. Her father, brother, mother – both mothers – are dead. Lena is finally, utterly, alone.

(9)

Lena doesn’t check social media, as a rule. Most of the people she’d be interested in keeping up with are off-limits now anyhow.

But she still has an Instagram account, a Twitter handle, from her days at the peak of National City’s elite before it all went wrong. They were never deactivated, and far be it for Lena’s near-eidetic memory to forget her own password.

She taps through smiling face after smiling face in the twilight of her lonely bedroom. Guards herself against the accidental double tap. Can’t afford to give the whole game away.

There Sam stands, an arm around Ruby’s shoulders and Alex’s lips pressed to her cheek at L-Corp’s most recent product launch. There’s Brainy and Nia with two dark-haired, cherub-cheeked infants cradled between them. There’s James, posing on top of a mountain with his latest photography award held high in triumph.

She sighs as she scrolls mindlessly. It’s so staged. Everything is an act, an elaborate performance of personhood. She thinks of the ultimate performance to which she’d been forced to bear witness, the reveal of the deception that rocked her to her core. The uncovered secret that ruined her life.

But did it? Did learning the truth ruin her life, or did Lena let it?

Might she not have allowed the pain and rage and betrayal to take over so she didn’t have to feel anything else? So she could have a clear-cut cause, an easy enemy?

Might she not have convinced herself that Kara never loved her at all? Doesn’t love her still? Would that not have seemed simpler than parsing through this arduous reality where intention does not equal protection, where love does not preclude pain?

Lena hasn’t opened Instagram in nine years. There’s a new direct message in her inbox.

It’s a video of a fluffy golden puppy appearing to drum its paws to the beat while N*Sync plays in the background. Lena stares at the four-year-old message until the words begin to swim.

@catcokara: saw this and thought of you

Lena drops her phone into the sheets. When tears leak from her eyes over her temples and into her hair, she doesn’t bother to wipe them away.

(10)

All things considered, it’s been a good day.

Her vegetable stall at the local farmer’s market had sold out within the hour. People come from far and wide now for her capsicums, her fresh grown herbs. It’s not like Lena needs the money but it’s a rewarding hobby, a good way to cultivate community spirit. Even if she still can’t look at a bunch of fresh kale without a deep twinge of something she’d prefer not to define.

She’d met Maya, newly graduated and home for the summer before starting her master’s at Cal Tech in the fall, for coffee and the fresh baked blueberry muffins one of her fourteen-year-old physics students had made for her.

She’d cleaned the house top to bottom in honour of the decade she has now called it home. Culled the unnecessary items from her already meagre wardrobe and taken the old clothes down to the local women’s shelter for reuse.

She’d finally gotten around to getting a haircut, long overdue. She appraises herself once she’s home again. Meets her own gaze steadily in the bathroom mirror.

She looks older, she supposes. Fine lines web out from the corners of her eyes and mouth, tracking the trials and tribulations that hadn’t yet been lived a decade ago. Her hair is still long, but lighter now in its natural waves. She hasn’t touched a straightening iron in years. Only a week ago she’d found her first grey hair.

She takes note of her own hands as she cooks dinner. Tanned and strong, callused in places and always with perpetual soil beneath at least one fingernail. How very un-Luthor-like.

It’s a beautiful clear evening as she sets the last clean pot on the draining board. Lena’s favourite kind of night, when the setting sun burns orange on the mountain ridges and laces the world with fire against the mauve eternity of sky.

She takes her wine glass out onto the deck. Settles into her favourite wicker chair as one by one the stars reveal themselves to those below. She breathes it in, the sand and the rock and the cacti and the great uncaring emptiness. She’s come to cherish that about this house, this place. The desert is so huge and against all that barren majesty, Lena and all her little problems matter not one jot.

It's humbling out here. It’s freeing.

She raises her wine glass. “Ten years, Kara,” Lena says to the desert and the empty sky. “I miss you.”

The celestial watercolour above her head fades out in cadmium vermilion violet. Silhouetted against the dying sun, heeled red boots touch down soundlessly on the deck in front of her.

“Lena,” a voice breathes like teardrops on plumerias, the sigh of an angel. “I’ve missed you, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> comments are my main source of protein if you are that way inclined <3
> 
> musical vibes for this may be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7tJiEgHGT2CqNkMHpPS0Ho)
> 
> come yell at me on tumblr: [searidings](https://searidings.tumblr.com)


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